HR Needs To Continually Reinvent Itself
1. Best practices focus on others and not ones
Here’s how this might be remedied: At a
personal level, I don’t need to be as (fill in the
blank: well dressed, wealthy, educated, cheerful,
etc.) as someone else, but I do need to take
care of myself well enough to have personal
well-being and fulfill my potential. In human
capital work, comparing to and learning from
others is good, but the primary agenda should
be determining whether or not the human
capital “best” practice will help your company
meet its unique goals. The benchmark should
not be others but yourself and working toward
personalized goals.
2. Best practices focus backward more than
forward. Learning what others have done will
always leave you behind them as they reinvent.
As one leader said, “I hope others will copy
our programs today because by the time they
have copied them, we have moved on to the
next practice. They will never catch up by
copying us.”
3. Best practices are often piecemeal and
not systemic. Too often a best practice is
considered in isolation (e.g., here is what a
leading company did in leadership training), but
not within the entire context (leadership training
occurs in the context of hiring, performance
management, executive commitment, cultural
norms, and so forth). Adapting only a piece
of the overall system does not often transfer
success to another setting.
4. Best practices create circular thinking.
Observing and learning from others often
causes us to share existing ideas rather than
innovate new ideas. Progress comes from
spiraling forward more than recycling the past.
Benchmarking that leads to using best practices
has been and will be a fundamental approach to
improving human capital, but to reinvent HR, we
need to build on that work and meaningful pivot to
guidance (see Figure).
HR Reinvention from
Benchmarking to Best Practice to Guidance
Benchmarking Best Practice Guidance
Answers the
Question:
How do I compare to
others?
What are others doing that
I can learn from?
What human capital initiatives
should I invest in to deliver key
results
Starts with … How am I doing? What are others doing? What should I be doing?
Improve through … Build on strengths;
Overcome weaknesses
Learning and mimicking
what others have done
Investing in initiatives that
deliver results
Fundamental
assumption Description Imitation Prescription
Primary analytics
tools Dashboards/ Scorecards Insights and interventions Impact and outcomes
Breadth
Generally scores on
single human capital area
(talent, leadership, or
organization)
Accesses others’ practice
in a specific human capital
initiative
Evaluates which human
capital area (talent, leadership,
organization, HR) and initiative
delivers results
HR Strategy & Planning Excellence presented by HR.com March 2021 14 Submit Your Articles
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